Reminds me of a hack I picked up from an old timer in Ashland who used an inner tube and a come along on a split madrone, except he left his on for almost a month because madrone is slow to react. Thing ended up with a gnarly bulge where the strap had been and he had to cut it off with a hacksaw. Fresh wood and a light pull seems to be the whole game with this trick, overdo it and the tree just grows around your hardware. Not sure the callus thing would work the same on a ponderosa that had been split for a while though.

That $2,300 hit is the part people skip past, they only look at the $180 monthly and call it dumb. Here is the thing nobody brings up though: a second fiber line often gets you a whole second provider with its own crew, so when the backhoe guy cuts one path you are not stuck waiting on the same company that is already swamped fixing everyone else. Last big outage here in Dayton, one carrier had a two day backlog because a whole neighborhood went dark at once, and the shops with two different carriers were back up while single line folks sat there. Same carrier on both circuits does not really count, since one bad splice upstream can drop both at the same time. Your 30 second switch test is the real selling point, because a lot of cheap failover setups only kick in after the primary fully dies, and that gap is where calls get dropped. I would just make sure the two lines actually run different routes all the way out of the building, not just to the same box in the alley.